0 How Price Tags Affect Willingness-To-Pay---Evidence from the Field (and Lab)

We investigate how posted prices affect consumers ' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for real-world products by eliciting the WTP from experienced consumers for water-resisting handbags and consumer electronics accessories before and after people see the price tag. To control for possible experimental artifacts, we elicit WTP with the following procedure: The incentive compatible Becker, DeGroot, Marschak (BDM) mechanism, explanations of the optimal strategy under BDM (truthfully revealing one's valuation), and paid practice rounds with subjects switching roles between buyers and sellers. Though this procedure has successfully minimized the willingness-to-pay and willingness-to accept gap in the literature (which we indeed replicate), we find a moderate but significant increase in WTP for the majority whose initial WTP were lower than the price tag, and a sharp decrease in WTP among the few whose initial WTP were higher than the price tag. This suggests a price effect driven by information regarding potential resale (and repurchase) opportunities. A similar laboratory experiment with college students replicates these findings. This suggests that when firms determine prices or discounts, they might have to care more about the negative “outside-opportunity ” effect of low prices instead of the positive “price placebo ” effect commonly observed in more controlled environments